Текст книги "Summon the Bright Water "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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I started to move towards the rendezvous while the long twilight could show me the way. The Box Rock ran out at a right angle to the shore, and part of it was now showing above the streaming ebb. If there was a clean and sheltered drop on the downstream side it was easy to understand why Marrin had called it his favourite deep.

The first I saw of him was the pool of light from his torch wavering over the meadow and the offshore mud. He had his suit on under a duffle coat and carried the aqualungs and the spare suit and life jacket for me. He helped me to dress fussily, exactly and with the utmost friendliness, meanwhile telling me of the likely conditions under water, that I should follow him closely and that my two cylinders would allow me some eighty minutes. We should come out, however, in less than half an hour, well before the turn of the tide.

At about ten-thirty we were on the rock and ready. He walked downstream until the water was nearly up to his knees and stopped.

‘We’ll jump from here,’ he told me, ‘into the Box Hole. Another step and I should be over the edge of the cliff.’

The dark surface of the water was disturbed for no apparent reason; I could see no other sign of a sudden increase in depth. When I jumped I fully expected to land on my bottom, but found myself easily descending along the face of rock. The tide was hardly perceptible and the water less opaque than I expected, so that the colours of Severn rock could be distinguished. Marrin kept close to me and a little ahead, his lamp showing me what to look for. Once a conger trailed out of a fissure in the cliff and passed upstream ahead of us so that one could watch the long, silver undulations, half fish and half snake. There was no weed except for occasional clumps.

When I looked for Marrin he had gone – in pursuit of the conger, as I thought, or perhaps out into the channel beyond the rock. Finding that I was negatively buoyant I started to walk along the bottom of the Box Hole and didn’t much like it. The bottom was quicksand or some yielding emulsion of mud and sand into which the fin on my right leg sank. The effort of pulling it out broke the strap and of course drove down the left leg. Cursing Marrin for not seeing that the strap was in good condition, I recovered the fin, but it would not stay on and was useless. I pulled out the left leg with some difficulty and decided that I had had enough. The silt stirred up by my efforts blinded me, and I no longer knew where the rock was. I was experienced enough not to panic, for I had only to release the weight belt round my waist and come up. I didn’t give a damn if his weight belt was lost for ever in the sand, as it certainly would be.

I felt for the release catch but it wouldn’t release; it had jammed. But it couldn’t jam! Then I did panic – it had not jammed. It had been jammed – and cunningly, for I couldn’t see or feel how. Meanwhile, the weight of the cylinders was pushing me little by little down into the quicksand. My right leg was kicking to no purpose. My frantic efforts to clear my left leg broke the strap on that fin also.

I began to discard the lead weights from the belt, all the time sinking lower. By the time they had gone I was swallowed up to the waist. I tried to lean forward and swim like a flat fish on top of the stuff. No good. I returned or was returned to an upright position and seemed to stay there. I was not sinking any more, so long as I kept still, but I could never get out. I had checked the cylinders before the start and reckoned that I had about an hour more of life before the inevitable end. It made no difference whether I chose to die by drowning or by gradual disappearance into the sand.

I might last until the arrival of the bore. That must surely finish me since the sudden increase in depth would reduce my buoyancy still further. Mental arithmetic underwater had the most curious effect of increasing rather than reducing panic until I managed to get control of myself and was only madly impatient because I kept getting my simple sums wrong. Bottom of the ebb at the Guscar Rocks yesterday morning was 8.30, and today 10.10. This evening 11.00. But the bottom of the ebb here should be earlier than slack water down there. Hold on! That doesn’t matter to the bore. What matters is the Bristol Channel tide not the Severn, which, as I had seen, can ebb backwards if it likes. Bore passed the Guscar Rocks at 11.00. I had heard that its speed up-river was that of a galloping horse. Twelve miles it had to go. Say, fifty minutes. Bore due at 11.50. I should still have a little air left unless I had used up too much struggling with the fins. On the other hand, by standing still with sand up to my chest I was using a minimum. Not that it mattered. At 11.50, give or take ten minutes, I should be dead.

I think I could never have composed my thoughts if there had been a chance of life. I was as still as a post driven into the bed of the river. The water was comfortable, its temperature cold but not too cold, possibly due to fresh water coming down from sunlit meadows. So far as movement went I was already dead, or rather in the calm of dying with the familiar objects of vision all faded away. As best I could, being an agnostic, a hopeful agnostic, I tried to concentrate on the sort of ‘I’ which would be worthy to live without a body. The intellect, perhaps. The power to love, perhaps.

All colours darkened. The pressure on my ears was fierce and sudden. I cleared them, and then it seemed as if land and sea had dissolved into a chaos through which I was tossed and cartwheeled with no sense of position or up or down. I was conscious of speed and dreamed – so far as my brain worked at all – that it must be some limbo through which one passed at death. I never realised that the bore had passed over and taken me with it until I slammed hard into the entrance to a pill, the soft mud rising in a fountain of gobs as I hit it. The great wave, having sucked up the quicksand or forced its mass of water down into it, had carried me off along with the other debris in its path. Why I escaped I do not know. I should have gone roaring up-river, surfing on the crest like a log or a drowned cow, or been smashed to a sodden lump on the bottom. It may be that the weight and turbulence of water necessary to release me only operated a second or two after the crest had passed, or that my near-empty cylinders were heavy enough to hold me back.

Clawing like a cat in a flower bed, I reached a low branch of hawthorn and firm ground. Upstream the young moon seemed to show plumes of spray but that may have been due to mud on my mask or grass waving in the slipstream of air. The surface of the Severn was now quite even, with the tide running up behind the bore. I could imagine the silt settling, ready for the ebb to sweep it down again to the bottom of that still and deadly hole.

I did not know where I was, close to the Box Rock or a quarter of a mile up-river. The firm ground above the sharp mud valley of the pill turned out to be a little copse. I took off my harness and pushed through it, arriving at the riverside meadow where I had left my clothes. The bore had been merciful, lifting me and sweeping me round the rock.

At some time Marrin himself, while observing salmon or his soul, must have been nearly trapped in that deep chosen for my death. I don’t think that he had any such intention at the Guscar Rocks, though his readiness to take me along suggests that he needed to know how experienced I was and how I would react underwater in case later he should decide that I was a menace to – to what? I am still unsure. In every one of my theories there is a flaw.

My clothes were not where I had changed – he helping me, God damn him! I first assumed that Marrin had taken them back with him so as to leave no evidence. It then occurred to me that he might well require some false evidence and that he would have left my clothes on the bank in a likely place a good distance away. It would not be upstream because he would never have plunged across the pill. So it must be downstream and not far from some track, sure to be utterly deserted at night, where he had left his van. Would my clothes be in the open? Well, no. He wouldn’t want them to be easily discovered by the first passer-by next morning, but he wouldn’t mind if they were found accidentally or by a deliberate search later on, thus muddling the date when I actually disappeared. A fairly firm beach, where I might have been tempted to have an evening swim, would be a good place. It would then be assumed that I had been caught by some whirling backwash of the ebb and drowned.

My torch was still attached to me. I set off to walk along the bank, flashing it at intervals to see what was below: nothing at all but the swiftly rising Severn gliding past the mud. I came to the beginning of a sea-wall. A little way out was the top of a sandbank, which looked hard and was now separated from the land by a narrow channel and would have tempted any foolhardy innocent to go for a swim when the tide was low. It was easy to reach from a little beach of shale and mud immediately under the high bank, and not far away was a rutted farm track leading inland. I was sure this would have been his choice, but it took me the hell of a time to find the clothes in the dark. They were spread out above high-tide mark and hidden from the sea wall itself by waving long grass.

Clearly Marrin intended that my clothes and pack should eventually be found. It would not be known to whom they belonged, since nobody would report me as missing till I failed to come home from, supposedly, Spain. It was a hundred to one against the body ever turning up. If it did, caught in a salmon weir or bumping against a Gloucester lock, and was identified, the evidence of Broom Lodge would be straightforward. I had left in the afternoon. It was known that I was interested in tracing Roman ports. Yes, Marrin had lent me his diving kit. Yes, he had taken me out to the Guscar Rocks to be quite sure that I knew how to use it. The only snag was that I had not carried it when I left Broom Lodge.

I cannot guess how he intended to get out of that, unless he could persuade some members of the commune into a lie, or deny that the suit, which would be an unrecognisable rag, had ever belonged to him. But all this is guesswork. The more I think of it, the surer I am that he was dead certain that my body could never escape from the bed of the river and that the question would never arise. I presume he had satisfied himself before driving away from the colony to our rendezvous with the suits and aqualungs in the boot that I had said nothing to Elsa.

I was nearing the limit of endurance and could now rest and recover Elsa’s sandwiches from my pack with – thank God! – the strong Broom Lodge cider. I quickly changed and took that remote track across road and railway with my aqualung rolled in the suit and slung from a shoulder. I was shivering in spite of the fastest walk I could manage, and my only hope was to arrive soon at some quiet spot in the Forest where I could build a fire. I was instinctively against calling at the nearest house. For one thing it would have to be found; houses are few and far between on Severn banks. For another, Marrin was Elsa’s admired uncle. But I doubt if that would have counted if I had not been obsessed by gratitude for the sandwiches.

It was some two miles to the wooded slopes of the Forest. I wandered about looking for a sheltered dell and found still better cover in the tumbled entrance to a private coal mine. Vegetation had grown up around it and over the path, so that I knew it was abandoned. With dead twigs and broken pit props I soon had a fire going in the entrance which could not be seen from anywhere but the immediate front.

There I warmed up and, after luxuriously dozing in the comfort, for a while returned to a shaken but more or less normal self. Imagination began to play over all those conversations with Marrin which I have recorded. Jealousy I could leave out as a motive. Elsa was really his niece, and anyway he knew nothing of our too impulsive affair.

Three clues to what had disturbed him stood out: the exploration for traces of palaeolithic man; the Severn cliffs; the turtle. One or all of these could reveal his carefully guarded secret of the financing of Broom Lodge. Had he found gold in some recess below the present level of the Severn? Quite impossible. Stone-age man did not, know how to smelt gold or any other metal. Then could he actually be a traditional alchemist who had recovered the ritual formula for transmuting lead and mercury into gold? Nonsense! The alchemy was a smoke screen. Could he be panning some stream or sandbank in which was gold carried down from the Welsh mountains? Unlikely. It would have been discovered thousands of years before Mr Simeon Marrin got at it. The turtle? Well, he had been evasive about the turtle, even alarmed when I talked of bringing down a zoologist to identify it. There was a connection of some sort, but not essential.

I slept at first light, woken by the baa-ing of sheep when the sun was up. Stream water for breakfast. Hunger would have to wait. After scattering the ashes of my fire I set off, carrying the bundle of suit and aqualung, and strode furiously through the Forest towards Cinderford which I assumed was big enough to possess a police station. I had no solid evidence except the weight belt – provided an expert could prove by marks that the buckle had been deliberately jammed. All the facts I could probe were that the suit was his, that he had allowed me to go to the bottom of a deep which he knew was lethal and then had deserted me and kept quiet about it.

Deliberately I passed close to Broom Lodge and hid beneath the stems of a clump of foxgloves. I can only explain that by the mixture of motives which accompanies a foul temper. I wanted to see if routine was proceeding normally. I hoped to catch a glimpse of Elsa. I needed to know if Marrin had returned safely and to see his face. There was no chance of being caught unless somebody stepped on me.

Several of the druidical drop-outs went off into the forest. Useless as witnesses to anything so I let them go. The workshops were innocently busy. The only view of Elsa was her backside as she leaned over a garbage can. So I slid back into the cover of the trees, stormed on my way without caution and ran slap into the major who was peering along a straight ash sapling which he had just cut down.

‘Hi! Where are you off to, Piers? I thought you had gone.’

‘I am off to the police station, Major, and I shall be obliged if you will come with me.’

‘Not going to run me in, are you?’

I didn’t reply to that. My intention was to prevent him trotting back to Broom Lodge and saying he had met me.

‘Had a spot of trouble with the locals?’

I was so angry that I spat out the truth. ‘Your Simeon Marrin tried to kill me last night.’

‘What had you found out, Piers?’

‘Nothing – except that he’s a fraud.’

‘Oh, I know that! But a prophet, possibly a prophet! So I must forgive him so long as he doesn’t land himself in gaol or commit unpardonable blasphemy. Don’t blame you for thinking us all crackers! Simeon and the Stone Age. Me and stirrups.’

‘Stirrups?’

‘Roman cavalry didn’t have ’em in Arthur’s time. Heavily armoured they were. That’s why folk memory called them knights when the legends started seven hundred years later. Hovered around throwing things or poking at the enemy. If you charged, either you fell off or the lance broke. Then you carried on with the spike at the other end.’

Evidently the major was something of a historian. The surprise of finding that there was such a professional side to him made me forget self-pity for a moment and listen.

‘Arthur’s tactics – that’s what I want to improve. Stirrups all they needed to be able to withdraw the lance. Then charge at the trot knee to knee and go through the Saxon infantry like a dose of salts.’

‘Are you proposing to alter the course of history?’ I asked, for he seemed to be considering transmigration backwards in time as well as forwards.

‘Yes. Why not? Aren’t pleased with the present, are you, if you’re on your way to the police station?’

He caressed his ash sapling.

‘That’ll be the right weight when it’s seasoned,’ he said, ‘and it will bend not break. Now why set the cops on Simeon? After all, he only tried to kill you. Much more important things than that! You should find out what he’s up to before he can make a fool of himself again. A pity for Elsa that would be. Nice girl. Young chap like you should make a pass at her. Get your face slapped, I expect, but it won’t hurt.’

‘Don’t you know what he’s up to?’ I asked.

‘Whatever will do the most good to the colony. Ever heard of St Januarius?’

‘The martyr whose blood liquefies?’

‘That’s the chap. Dried blood kept in a holy bottle of some kind. Faithful come in their thousands to see it liquefy. Priests make sure that it damn well does when it should. A lie to the senses of course, but all to the good. It makes thousands believe truths which the senses have nothing to do with. Why are you carrying that kit? Been diving with Simeon?’

‘Yes. At night this time. And over a quicksand where he knew I must drown.’

‘Must or could?’

‘Must. But when the bore arrived it pulled up the whole bottom and me with it.’

‘So he doesn’t know you escaped?’

‘He soon will.’

‘Why not stay dead, old boy?’

‘What for?’

‘Want to know where he gets his gold from, don’t you?’

‘Not for myself.’

‘I know that. Heard you talk about a lot of antique economies on the first night. You’d rather be famous than rich every time. Stay dead and you’ll have a chance. Come marching into Broom Lodge with a warrant and you won’t.’

I asked him what his interest was. As he had once said to me, a monk ought to live in poverty but there was no reason why the monastery should. However Marrin came by his money, it kept the commune going.

‘Simple, Piers, simple! I’ve been worried. Old soldier, sane sometimes. Assume Simeon made the bowl. Where did he get the gold from? Alchemy, my arse! Imagine the scandal if he’s pinching it somewhere! Bloody newspaper headlines! Worse blasphemy than ever. That’s what I want to avoid. Assume he scooped his bowl out of the bed of the Severn. “Then Did Those Feet in Ancient Time?” We have to know what he has been up to. His father was a dear friend of mine. Didn’t tell you that, did I? You stay dead, boy! Much more alive that way. Tuck down in the Forest somewhere near! Needn’t tell me where. Two of us can check up on him when one can’t.’

With his visionary lunacies of Arthur, enhanced by trotting down the Mall in shining armour, his militant Christianity to match and his clipped speech, he puzzled me. He must have been close on fifty, though his straight back and flat belly were those of a fit man ten years younger. But the age difference hardly counted; I realised that he was treating me as if I had been one of his trusted subalterns in trouble. There had been a wholly charming smile when he described himself as sane, sometimes.

‘Stands to reason!’ he went on. ‘You’re dead and I’m not. I can’t dive but I’ve got a car. You haven’t got a car, but you can dive. I’ll be in Little Drybrook outside Bream this evening with some rations. Say, half past seven. I’m a guest and don’t have to dine in mess if I don’t want to. Up to you whether you decide to meet me or not. Old-fashioned Humber. Black. You can’t mistake it.’

When I left him I was far from convinced of his reliability, but I did not go to the Cinderford police station. Marrin’s motive had first to be investigated. If I could not present his reason for attempted murder my allegations might not stand up. It was open to him to swear that he had tried to rescue me, failed to find me and in order to avoid newspaper publicity for his beloved commune had kept quiet about the accident.

To remain dead was not difficult. My name and face were only known at Beachley and Blakeney, where I had stayed at inns on this side of the river. So movement was no problem, nor was food. Provided that I watched the street long enough to be sure that no member of the commune was about I could enter any village shop without arousing curiosity. Though the Forest seemed gloriously empty there were a good many hikers on the green tracks and a few genuine tramps drawing unemployment pay from a post office, saving on rent and living life as – in good weather – it should be lived. I could pass as either.

Business for the day was to find a secluded spot not too far from Broom Lodge which I could make my headquarters. I thought the right choice would be one of the conifer woods close-planted by the Forestry Commission, dark and dismal but without anything to attract travellers on foot who naturally stick to the great oaks spreading over their waving green sea. First, I quartered a plantation near Staple Edge. That was no good – neither dell nor free mine, too dense and thus with a risk of fire if I lit one. However, it held an outcrop of rock forming an unmistakable landmark, and there I hid the diving kit which was a nuisance to carry and could attract attention. Then I struck south-east towards Blakeney and found another dense and trackless stand of conifers not far from Broom Lodge.

It covered the side of a steep hill, pock-marked by the typical depressions which might be due to Romans after iron or free miners after coal. Exploration led me to a level patch where the timber was thin enough to admit some sunlight. A building, which may have been a large cottage or a small iron foundry, had stood there once and its site had not been completely cleared by the foresters. The bricks of an outside lavatory still stood to a height of some four feet – a weatherproof den if I could find a roof for the three sides. That was provided by a rusty base plate from some engine. When a lever and a ramp of loose stones had got it into position I covered it with dead branches so that it looked like a rubbish heap to be burned when the woods were safely wet. More twigs laid over the turf beneath formed a bed – uncomfortable, but still a bed. As for fire, there was no danger whatever, for among the ruins was the blackened dome of a hearth with a few courses of chimney. Industrial rather than sylvan peace, but it served very well. There was no sign that gypsies or enterprising small boys had ever pushed through to the heart of the plantation – no paper bags, plastic bottles or travellers’ turds.

All morning, while eyes and legs were searching for a home, mind had been pondering the major’s question: did Marrin make the golden cauldron or was it ancient work? That rich, two-handled vessel, primitive but exquisitely curved, might be Saxon or a Roman import from the east. I am no authority on art, and without an original in front of me for comparison I could not tell. In any case this conjecture came up against a dead end. Why the smoke screen of alchemy and the yarn of a win on the football pools if Marrin had discovered and dug up an ancient hoard from tomb or temple, and could have made a fortune even after splitting with the state or the landowner?

I could not give the answer, but I was convinced that I was on the right track. Whatever he had found – and the Forest with its ancient mines and ports was as likely a place as any to unearth a buried treasure – he was keeping quiet about it and iniquitously melting it down himself to support his bloody colony of cranks.

I was at last very content that the major had advised me to remain dead. I was free to study Marrin’s movements without his ever dreaming that in his mysterious excursions a silent follower was closely behind, ready to expose him and rescue for posterity what treasure was left. Now that I had a home, I could familiarise myself with my territory as cautiously as any animal. I was about to write ‘hunted animal’, but that was false. I was an animal with a grudge and my quarry was human.

Never before had I realised how unforgiving is the conflict between the sacredness of knowledge and the acquisitiveness of the greedy, whether for the sake of personal wealth or the propagation of a creed, positive right against a wretched negative. Marrin would put it the other way round, convinced to the extent of murder.

In spite of the major’s sound advice I might well have decided against meeting him that evening if he had not uttered the words ‘with the rations’. Since Elsa’s sandwiches the night before I had had nothing to eat except a slab of greasy fried fish bought from a passing van. Shops anywhere near my headquarters were to be avoided. The corpse was learning that continual caution was needed if it was to stay dead among the living.

The map showed me that Little Drybrook was a hamlet safely far from Broom Lodge, which could be reached by forest tracks. I arrived early to reconnoitre the surroundings and waited just off the roadside. His battered car was unmistakable.

‘Ah! Glad to see you. Fixed up? Better be! Rain tonight,’ he said as soon as I stopped the car.

‘I can keep it out.’

‘Used to open-air life? Not all books?’

‘Not all books. Camels, donkeys, canoes – you name it. I’ve travelled by it.’

‘Middle East?’

‘Middle East.’

‘Colder up here.’

‘Colder in Greenland.’

‘Been there too?’

His voice sounded regretful when, finding myself slipping into his staccato speech, I spoke of the extreme climates I had known. Since he had been just too young for the war he may have seen little active service. Possibly the unexciting existence of a regular soldier had unhinged a too contemplative mind and inclined him towards dreams of a past in which war for the sake of Christianity was the normal spice of life. He’d have done better to choose the Crusades, but I suppose the very dubious Arthur gave more scope for imagination.

‘Good man! Thought you’d manage! But you’ll need a blanket.’

He handed over a splendid carriage rug dating from the time when there were no car heaters and told me to take it with me when I left.

‘Jump in! Short run into the Forest where we won’t be interrupted.’

He had found an idyllic spot between the armchair roots of a noble oak where he opened his picnic basket. It had a luxurious air of the eighteen-nineties about it and had belonged, he told me, to his grandfather. Gin, whisky, white Burgundy, strawberries and half a cold Severn salmon appeared, each from its proper compartment.

‘Couldn’t swipe anything from Broom Lodge,’ he said, ‘so I got it in Lydney and hung about till the chap had cooked it for me. Ought to know how. Catches them.’

While we were eating I encouraged him to talk of his religion. He was as sure of immortality as any pious Christian but considered that Marrin’s belief in reincarnation was an unnecessary theory. I ventured to bring up the question of Arthur’s battles, in which he himself seemed to be personally involved; then he only choked on his salmon and raised an emotional, hot-gospeller’s voice to declare that the past was always the present.

‘What’s the past? Only a string of presents one after another. No such thing as time, Simeon says. He’s quite right there. So the past is always the present if you can recognise it. That’s the difficulty: to recognise the fourth dimension when you’re in it. Could draw a diagram if I were a mathematician.’

Having cordially accepted the string-of-presents theory as expounded by Major Quixote – there’s a flaw in it somewhere, but it does account for visions of the past – I started on the strawberries and asked him how much he knew of Marrin’s movements.

‘Too busy to leave the place in the day much unless he’s off to London to sell his trinkets, but he does go out at night when the tide serves his purpose. Meditating under water they say.’

‘And if I want to leave a message for you, how shall I do it?’

He asked if I was sure that I could find again the ragged stump of the sapling which he had cut. Yes, I was sure.

‘Then bury your note alongside and put a stick to mark it. I’ll do the same.’

It was now twilight. I thanked him warmly and got up to go.

‘Any trouble with alcohol?’ he asked.

‘No trouble.’

‘Good! Take the whisky bottle.’

I thanked him warmly and left, but did not go home. First I watched the major drive away; he was shaking his head and talking to himself when he got into the car, perhaps in sadness at the criminality of his enigmatic friend. Then I set out on foot for Broom Lodge. I reckoned that if there was anything at all in this meditation over the flowing tide, Marrin, after last night, would have a good deal to meditate about and might get down to it straightaway.

It was nearly dark when I arrived, so that I was perfectly safe in the garden on the open front of the house. Lights were on in the hall for those who preferred earnest discussion to bed; lights were going off upstairs as craftsmen and farm hands who would be up early settled down to sleep. It occurred to me that if Simeon Marrin wished to give his disappearances an air of spiritual mystery he would slip away at the back into the shadows of the trees rather than walk out of the front door like ordinary humanity; so I made a circuit into the woodland at the back and waited.

A little before midnight, eight persons left the house and took the forest track into the darkness. I could tell by his height that one of them was Marrin, carrying a box. Another appeared to be carrying a trumpet. When they had passed, I followed. I had no experience of this sort of prowling, but it seemed simple enough so long as the pursued made enough noise, however slight, to cover the sound of the pursuer. Of that there was little, for I kept to the soft grass in the middle of the ride and was ultra-careful where I stepped.

It was soon plain that their destination was not the river but somewhere deep in the Forest. They stopped in an open space between the oaks where the young green bracken was thick over the brown mat of last year’s fronds. Marrin used a powerful flashlight to satisfy himself that there was no one in the immediate neighbourhood, but omitted to search behind tree trunks. It looked as if an open-air ceremony was about to begin. That did not surprise me. I had thought all along that the commune was very secular – plenty of casual discussions and meetings but, apart from the hours of meditation, no set ritual. I had expected from that druidical inner circle robes, invocations and other impressive mumbo-jumbo.